A tempest in a teapot is but a drop in the ocean: action-objects in analogical mathematical reasoning

We discuss a brief transcribed excerpt from a task-based interview with Li, an 11.5-year-old participant in a design-based research study of probabilistic cognition pertaining to the binomial. We investigate whether and how Li made sense of the behavior of an unfamiliar computer-based artifact—the diminishing proportional impact of successive random samples on the overall shape of a dynamically accumulating outcome distribution. Li constructed two informal analogical situations as multimodal discursive means of concretizing, elaborating, and communicating his emerging understanding of the artifact’s behavior. These non-routine utterances shifted the discourse to an explicitly embodied, imagistic space bearing unique affordances for negotiated epistemic syntheses of phenomenological and technological constructions of quantitative relations. Microgenetic analysis suggests that Li’s presymbolic notion was not a static magnitude but an intensive-quantity “action–object”; he subsequently unpacked this dynamical “a/b” qualia into its constitutive “a” and “b” elements. We reflect on implications of this counter-curricular sequence for educational design. Background: Student Analogy as Researcher Opportunity We are interested in the phenomenon of mathematics learning. We conceptualize mathematics learning as the process in which an individual builds meaning for mathematical artifacts, such as notions, semiotic devices, and procedures. We research this learning process in an attempt to understand what it is that students do when they build meaning for mathematical artifacts, what teachers do to support this process, and what instructional materials may best serve this process. In the current study, we examine one student’s metaphorical reasoning as he attempts to construct meaning for the behavior of an unfamiliar mathematical artifact. In particular, we seek to determine the student’s initial ontology of the artifact as indicating his prearticulated phenomenological resources that could plausibly serve as proto-mathematical. So doing, we question the warrant of some epistemological assumptions underlying traditional mathematics curriculum. Our comments in this essentially theoretical paper should be taken as no more than conjectural. Nevertheless, an appeal of the paper would be the potentially effective theoretical fit, and hence methodological fit, between the dynamical nature of the particular artifact at the center of the student’s inquiry and our interest in the dynamics of multimodal mathematical reasoning. This fit enables us to elaborate on Phenomenology tenets and Learning-Sciences conjectures regarding the precedence of unreflective perception of action over analytic construction of concepts, as we investigate the purchase of these conjectures on our empirical data. Ultimately, we hope to draw tentative conclusions aligned with parallel research efforts so as to offer an intellectual space for conversation informing future studies. Probability—the mathematical content selected for this study—is amenable for our investigation of tension between phenomenological and cultural constructions of situations and artifacts. That is, the unique epistemological “mode” created by situations involving uncertainty, and in particular the challenges of articulating such uncertainty symbolically, appears to impel students to seek non-symbolical discursive genres as means of expressing their intuitive quantitative reasoning (e.g., Rubin & Hammerman, 2007). The consequent protracted discursive interim from the embodied to the symbolical is conducive for examining the microgenesis of meaning. Namely, we conjecture that the metaphors generated by this study’s focal student served him as more than vehicles for communicating “ready-made” coherent notions. Rather, we believe that the cognitive–discursive actions of evoking and “grammarizing” these metaphors were instrumental for the student’s initial articulation of his reasoning. If this conjecture bears out through further research, it would present a number of implications for mathematics-education theory and practice. In terms of theory, we would suggest that idiosyncratic metaphors could enable diverse individual students to ground challenging mathematical constructs in their prior quantitative experiences, both formal and informal. In terms of practice, we would encourage teachers to cultivate socio-mathematical classroom norms of discourse in which such metaphorical constructions are approved and possibly even solicited. Abrahamson, D. (2010). A tempest in a teapot is but a drop in the ocean: action-objects in analogical mathematical reasoning. In K. Gomez & J. Radinsky (Eds.), “Learning in the Disciplines”-Proceedings of the 9 International Conference of the Learning Sciences (ICLS2010) (Vol. X, pp. xx – xx). University of Illinois at Chicago: ICLS. CD ROM.